Marek's Dev Diary: April 4, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what caught my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Space Engineers 2

• We released a much requested set of blocks this week ;)
  
  
  
  
• The team is working on VS 1.2, VS 1.5 and VS 2, but I was focusing on other projects this week so I don’t have that many SE2 updates
• We tweaked the 'acceleration-based camera shake' feature, which creates camera movement proportional to acceleration. Higher acceleration produces more shake.
  The feature is disabled for standard walking/running movements to prevent annoyance, but activates during higher-acceleration scenarios like boost jetpack mode or when piloting ships with powerful thrusters.
  Our next step is balancing the effect to provide meaningful feedback without becoming overwhelming. We're also carefully considering implementing similar effects for deceleration that enhance immersion without being excessive.
• VRAGE Render team is doing few experiments with clouds
  
  
  
• GUI and HUD prettification - we had a meeting with UI artist Alek, our game designers and programmers, to discuss specific changes to our GUI and HUD to make it consistent across the entire game, fix some UX issues and inconsistencies, and make it aesthetically pleasing. We ended up with a big list, so I'll mention only some: 
• Many screens don't have proper layout with good proportions or things like golden ratio
• Back button is often over a horizontal line which makes you worry where it belongs (it breaks the Gestalt principle), the same for Load button in the Load game screen
• There are too many font sizes so we will narrow it down to max 3-5 sizes and use only those across the entire game
• There are too many colors (black, gradient of black, blue, blue with some green, etc.) so we will also narrow them down and make them consistent across the entire game
• Text size in HUD (especially the tooltips) is probably too small for console players (they would probably not pass certification) so we need to improve that too
• The biggest work will be to polish the screen layout of many screens (G-screen, Terminal, Game options, etc.) to be intuitive, things that belong together to be framed together, proper frame and background
• Also we allow players to change the GUI background opacity which may make some screens unreadable on bright scenes, so we will be addressing this too. 
• I know that many players probably don't worry about this stuff but we want to be proud of our work, and we simply can't leave it like this!
• Natiq and Mirko (our artists) are working on planetary textures and biomes. This is a big task, we still have many things we need to improve to make our SE2 planets look amazing. One thing that they proposed and we are considering is the terrain displacement in the far distances. I am not sure yet which way we will go (we can do it only visually, we can do it in terrain data - in voxels) but I think it’s very important for visual pleasure!